Chapter 14: Moon-Sickness

At ten the old herbalist knocked on the cabin door with her stick.

She stood on the step in her black shawl, small and fierce, and looked past me at Halvard shaving at the basin.

"Warden."

"Elder."

"I want the girl for an hour. At the clinic."

"She's the one who decides," Halvard said, and wiped his jaw with a towel.

I put on my boots.

The pack clinic was a long low building behind the hall, with a green door and my name still lettered under the nurse's window.

Lucan had locked it yesterday, and he had given the old woman the only key.

Inside it smelled of antiseptic and dried lavender.

Everything was where I had left it.

Tidy trays, labeled drawers, the exam table with its paper roll.

I stood in the middle and felt a pull in my chest that was only grief for a room.

"Sit," the old woman said.

She lowered herself onto the stool and set her stick across her knees.

"Tell me about the moon-sickness."

I stared at her.

"Delphine said I had it," I said. "Nobody ever examined me."

"Who told you she said it?"

"Lucan. Two nights ago, on the shore."

"Hm."

The old woman took a very long time to say the next thing.

"I have been the herbalist of this pack for sixty-one years," she said.

"I trained Delphine's mother. I trained Delphine, for one winter, before she got ideas."

She leaned forward on the stool.

"In all my years there has never been a thing called moon-sickness."

The room got very quiet.

"A cramp of the Luna that comes monthly and passes in an hour," she said. "There is no such thing."

Her voice did not rise.

"A woman who bleeds at eleven at night, pregnant, is losing a child. Any healer in the territory knows it."

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